- Title
- Images of Albert Namatjira in Australian popular culture of the 1950s
- Creator
- Ramsland, John
- Relation
- Inter-Cultural Studies Vol. 2, Issue 2, p. 11-26
- Relation
- http://www.newcastle.edu.au/centre/ics/journalissues/index.html
- Publisher
- University of Newcastle, School of Humanities and Social Science
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2002
- Description
- This essay examines images of the Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira in the Australian media during the 1950s. The focus is on the print media and to a lesser extent on film, both documentary and dramatic (Nile, 1998, p. 1). Both forms of media helped to shape Australian culture in the 1950s although there were, of course, many other important forces at work as well. The forms of popular print media used here include travel and other non-fiction books (White 1997), journals, magazines and newspapers all of which were a vibrant part of the consumer culture of the time. They all enjoyed broad distribution and were widely read by the so-called ‘ordinary Australian’. Distribution was primarily through outlets such as local newsagents and general bookshops in city, suburban and country shopping centres and local subscription or municipal lending libraries, which were used with great frequency across the country at the time. The sources used for this paper were mostly those that addressed a general rather than a specialised audience and readership. Many were specifically aimed at ‘ordinary Australians’ such as travel books that were immensely popular (White, 1997). General availability and accessibility by a wide range of people is the key to the concept of ‘popular culture’ used in this paper. Similarly, the films discussed in this paper were those that had a general distribution in Australian city, suburban and country town cinemas that catered for a general rather than specialised audience. These were people who attended cinemas regularly and frequently before the advent of television. The photographs and other images of Albert Namatjira described in the course of the study all had a wide and repeated exposure in the Australian popular media, especially in newspapers and weekly magazines. In the print media of the 1950s, illustrations were as important as words in conveying meaning and instant recognition to the reading audience in the public arena.
- Subject
- Albert Namatjira; images; popular culture; media; Aboriginal artists
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/34908
- Identifier
- uon:3760
- Identifier
- ISSN:1445-1190
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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